There’s not much you can find in common between the “sunny ways” campaign waged by the Liberal Party in the last federal election and some of the attack ads running in the U.S. primaries, but Clive Veroni suggests it would be a mistake for CMOs to ignore any of it.
Veroni is the author of Spin: How Politics Has the Power to Turn Marketing On Its Head. He argues that the rise of social media and other forces have flipped the age-old relationship where advertising experts would advice political strategists. He recently appeared in Toronto as part of the Spur Festival, and spoke with Marketing shortly afterwards by phone. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Do you ever wish you’d waited to finish the book until after Donald Trump’s campaign for the U.S. nomination?
Well, I don’t think I would have changed much in terms of my analysis, because really my book is about how political strategizing is changing marketing. Certainly Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as well are indications of a growing divide in the American political scene, which has been going on for some time. When Obama got elected in 2008, I had the impression, naively, that he would be a great unifying force in American politics. The seeds were already planted, I think, for a really wide division between the two halves.
Maybe so, but what should marketers take away from what they’re seeing happening right now?
I talk a lot in the book about the adoption of “wedge politics” as a marketing tool. That is to say, taking an extreme position on some issue that antagonizes people at the opposite end of the spectrum. But, doing it in a way that you know you’re going to antagonize people, but not caring because, in the political realm, they’re never going to vote for you anyway, and in marketing terms, they’re never going to buy your product. In fact, getting them riled up gets your supporters more ginned up about supporting you. This is one of the things playing out right now in the U.S., right? The more extreme the positions, the more entrenched they become.
How do brands exploit that polarization?
Traditionally, marketers have had a kind of bell curve view of the world. In fact, the idea for the book came from sitting in a meeting at Rigley’s one day and looking at a bell curve and people’s responses to an ad we had produced. It occurred to me that this is how my mass marketing clients tend to look at the world. The goal is to get to the middle of that curve as high and as wide as possible without really paying much attention to what’s happening at the edges. What political strategists do is pay a lot of attention to what’s happening at the edges, and use the tension between those two extremes to create advantage. What we’re seeing in the marketing realm is brands starting to do that as well.
What if you’re a brand that doesn’t want to be perceived as “political?”
There’s no more neutral territory for them to occupy. Standing in the middle of the road is no longer an option for most brands. Look at Lego. Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist, is doing this project in Australia that involved building portraits out of Legos, and he sent a note to Lego saying he’d like to make a bulk purchase, and the company said, “Well, we don’t get involved in political things, so we’re not going to sell you our Legos.” You can kind of understand the Lego position: They’re selling toys. They tried to occupy the neutral territory, but of course there was instant backlash and people protesting on social media. And Ai Weiwei, who is a really practiced publicist, started putting up vehicles – one was in Toronto by the AGO – with an open sun roof where people could dump their unused Legos in them and make donations. Well, eventually Lego had to retreat and change its position. In an age where people are putting out their own position in a very public way, they’re demanding to know where brands stand on any number of issues.
If politics is influencing marketing to this extent, how should CMOs think about who they hire and the skill sets they need?
If you think about political campaigns, they tend to be made up of an ad hoc collection of people. Some professional strategists, a lot of volunteers, some part-time people. They all have to be assembled really quickly into an efficient machine that runs a campaign and then disbands. How do they do that? What’s the thing that makes all of that stuff happen? It’s diversity of experience. I think marketers need to be looking beyond the kind of MBA-trained marketing specialist.
